Epic games gives up the Gears of War love, and co-op is in. People will non- …

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There are some things in game design—and of course QA—that should be obvious enough to go unspoken. In this life though, you should never assume that game developers are that smart. You get demos of games that tell you to stay far, far away, as well as high-profile releases that aren't interested in your business if you don't have an HDTV. It's sad that someone should have to make announcements about simple things, but that's the video game industry for you. It's good to hear that Gears of War is avoiding these pitfalls; now we know that they are in fact testing the game with SDTVs. Everyone should do this, but not enough are. If you bought an Xbox 360 but do not yet own an HDTV, this title is safe for you.

Even better, it has been announced that the game is going to feature co-op throughout the entire game over Xbox Live. This is another one of those features that everyone wants, but is so rarely put into games. It should put the game on the "must have" list of every co-op fan on the planet. I was looking forward to the game before, but these two details demonstrate that they're adding all the features you'd want and avoiding all the mistakes you wouldn't.